David B. Ruderman, “Review of ‘Jewish Identity and Society in the Seventeenth Century: Reflections on the Life and Work of Refael Mordekhai Malki’, by Minna Rozen,” AJS Review, vol. 19, no. 2 (November 1994): 265-267

BOOK REVIEWS 265 wonders if Faur is as Jews and conv Iberian Renee Levine Melammed Franklin & Marshall College Lancaster, Pa. Minna Rozen. Jewish Identity and Society in the Seventeenth Century: Reflections on the Life and Work of Refael Mordekhai Malki. Translated from the Hebrew by Goldie Wachsman. Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modem Judaism, 6. Ttibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1992. x, 190 pp. Despite its presumptuous title, Minna Rozen of Tel Aviv University offers in this monograph an intelligent and informative account of the life and thought of Refael Mordekhai Malki, an interesting and multifaceted settler in Jerusalem at the end of the seventeenth century. Malki, who apparently had been a converso, lived in Livorno before arriving in Jerusalem in 1677. Trained as a physician, he seems to have acquired considerable wealth both before and during his residence in Jerusalem, allowing him considerable prestige and power as a lay leader of the city's Jewish community. On the basis of a lengthy commentary on the Torah penned by Malki containing long digressions on his own life and attitudes and on conditions in his community in general, Rozen ably reconstructs the material and spiritual sides of Malki's life in Jerusalem against the political and economic background of Jewish society under the Ottoman government. She defines her task as three dimensional: to situate Malki's life within the community of anusim in his day (she insists, albeit unconvincingly to my mind, on the singular usage of the Hebrew term for forced convert rather than the term converso or New Christian); within Jewish society in Jerusalem; and within the ideal messianic society he envisioned and described in his Torah commentary. Rozen's book is divided into three broad sections. The first is an overview of the political and social history of Jerusalem during Malki's life; the second describes his life and career in Jerusalem; the third considers Malki's intellectual and spiritual ruminations, including his ultimate vision of a reformed Jewish community in Jerusalem. Through this three-pronged analysis, Rozen strives to penetrate a "deeper stratum" of the personal life of Malki, "revolving about the struggle of an individual to affirm an identity" (p. 4) as a converso wishing to define his Jewish self. In the end, she views Malki as a highly 266 BOOK REVIEWS conflicted person Europe in people, and whom the he co worst of nations." The great strength of Rozen's analysis is in her treatment of the political and economic dimensions of Malki's life, integrating them most successfully into the wider picture of Jewish communal politics: relations between Jews and the Ottoman government, between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, between Jerusalem and Diaspora Jewish communities, between the wealthy and scholarly classes, and between the various factions of rabbis living in Jerusalem. When she treats the intellectual and spiritual sides of Malki's life, however, her analysis appears less convincing. No doubt Malki's prestige among his coreligionists stemmed from his success as a physician in Jerusalem. Malki devoted significant parts of his writing to medical, geographic, and astronomical matters, including an entire treatise on medicinal plantlife in Israel and another on the pulse rate. According to Rozen, his familiarity with contemporary astronomy was even more impressive, based not only on his reading but also on his own observations of the heavens. Rozen's treatment of these matters is superficial and is presented in isolation from the other aspects of his social and intellectual life. She instead refers the reader to the introduction of a recent anthology of Malki's medical writings published by Meir Benayahu, who also fails to evaluate deeply their medical and cultural import. Rozen's description might have been enriched by a more careful assessment of medical practice in Malki's day both among Jews and non-Jews, including the currency of particular medical therapies, and by a more meaningful evaluation of his botanical and astronomical knowledge in relation to that of his contemporaries. At one point, she compares Malki's view on heliocentricity with that of Tobias Cohen, the author of the medical encyclopedia Ma'ase Tuviyyah, published in Venice in 1707. At the very least, she might have compared Tobias's medical knowledge with that of Malki. While Tobias may have appeared conservative with respect to his views on the solar system, he was in fact quite innovative and up-to-date with respect to medical theory and practice. A comparison of the two would constitute a first step in situating Malki within the context of the growing professionalization of medical practice among Jews in the seventeenth century. It would also have allowed w M BOOK REVIEWS 267 Rozen to consider Mal university training in Padua's medical school. One of the critical questions in interpreting Malki's spiritual sympathies revolves around his supposed loyalty to the Sabbatian movement. The issue was first raised by Meir Benayahu in his pioneering essay on the struggle for control of the Yeshiva Beit Ya'akov of Jerusalem but refuted by Shlomo Zalman Havlin, who concluded that there was no basis for Benayahu' assumption that Malki was a crypto-Sabbatian. Minna Rozen fully accepts Halvin's position with no hesitation and little elaboration on the matter. It is a pity that she was unaware of Elisheva Carlebach's important new book, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies (New York, 1990), based on her Columbia dissertation, which appeared as early as 1986. Carlebach too considers the new material presented by Havlin but arrives at the strong conclusion, contra Havlin and Rozen, that "a strong Sabbatian strand" ran through the entire struggle for control of the yeshiva and that Malki "was a crypto-Sabbatian who dedicated his career to remaking Jerusalem into a Sabbatian stronghold" (Carlebach, p. 42). This is not th place for a full reconsideration of the issue, but Carlebach's emphatic position on Malki might have obliged Rosen to reconsider her position or, at the very least, to discuss more fully and directly the matter of Malki's attitude to Shabbetai Zevi. By ruling out the possibility that Malki had Sabbatian loyalties, Rozen does not explain adequately his estrangement from his son-in-law Moses Hagiz; nor his strong ties to the Sabbatian stronghold in Livorno; nor his bizarre premonition in a dream of the death of Rabbi Moses ibn Haviv, another prominent anti-Sabbatian (the issue for her revolved around the matter of Jerusalem's tax policy); nor how a supposedly fierce anti-Sabbatian "mingled freely with Sabbatians" (p. 92), as she describes it; nor how an anti-Sabbatian "should have envisioned a messianic role for anusimn so as to rationalize their continued apostasy" (p. 98); nor how Malki's utopian blueprint of society and messianic passion square fully with his alleged anti-Sabbatianism. Rosen offers Malki's comment on Sabbatianism as "a rank weed," the unfortunate result of undisciplined study of Lurianic Kabbalah by the masses, to substantiate her view that Malki belonged to the opposition camp. But the matter cannot be resolved so easily; voicing opposition might easily conceal deep-seated appreciation. Given the ambiguities that remain, 268 and BOOK given question REVIEWS the of critical his i relation one. Finally, there remains the issue of Malki's converso identity, h "wrestling with a double life" as Rozen puts it. Unlike the i Sabbatianism, there is no reason to doubt Rozen's hypothesi Malki's converso ancestry. But is she fully convincing when sh argues that this background explains the duality and ambiguity t Malki's inner struggle "to unearth the essence of his identity" admits that Malki never refers to his Christian past. Despite h effort to compare him with such notable conversos as Isaac C Orobio de Castro, and Uriel da Costa, Malki emerges relat comparison to the others with respect to the impact their Christ in shaping their newly constituted Jewish identities and the inevit embedded in the latter. For Malki, the dual perspective of his ident visible at all. Rozen's ambitious attempt to explain Malki's dialecti of love and revulsion toward the Jewish community of Jerusalem related to the ambiguity of his converso past, including Christian of Judaism, is not fully satisfying. Might it not have been simpl his conflicting postures as the result of his constant political ent with individuals and institutions in Jerusalem rather than to attrib some vague notion of converso identity? Whether or not Rozen has conclusively interpreted Malki messianic, and converso identities, she has certainly produced a st informative, and thoughtful account of the man against his made a useful contribution to our less than complete understa complex nature of Jewish culture and society in the seventeenth editors of the new Judaic series published by J. C. B. Mohr and th Goldie Wachsman, deserve special mention for producing such and elegant English translation of Rozen's book. David B. Ruderman Yale University New Haven, Conn. Gershon David Hundert. The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opat6w in the Eighteenth Century. Johns Hopkins Jewish Studies. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992. xvi, 242 pp.